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By the time she reached her late twenties, Eudora Welty (1909-2001) was launching a distinguished literary career. She was also becoming a capable gardener under the tutelage of her mother, Chestina Welty, who designed their modest garden in Jackson, Mississippi. From the beginning, Eudora wove images of southern flora and gardens into her writing, yet few outside her personal circle knew that the images were drawn directly from her passionate connection to and abiding knowledge of her own garden. Near the end of her life, Welty still resided in her parents' house, but the garden-and the friends who remembered it-had all but vanished. When a local garden designer offered to help bring it back, Welty began remembering the flowers that had grown in what she called \"my mother's garden.\" By the time Eudora died, that gardener, Susan Haltom, was leading a historic restoration. When Welty's private papers were released several years after her death, they confirmed that the writer had sought both inspiration and a creative outlet there. This book contains many previously unpublished writings, including literary passages and excerpts from Welty's private correspondence about the garden. The authors ofOne Writer's Gardenalso draw connections between Welty's gardening and her writing. They show how the garden echoed the prevailing style of Welty's mother's generation, which in turn mirrored wider trends in American life: Progressive-era optimism, a rising middle class, prosperity, new technology, women's clubs, garden clubs, streetcar suburbs, civic beautification, conservation, plant introductions, and garden writing. The authors illustrate this garden's history--and the broader story of how American gardens evolved in the early twentieth century-with images from contemporary garden literature, seed catalogs, and advertisements, as well as unique historic photographs. Noted landscape photographer Langdon Clay captures the restored garden through the seasons.

By the time she reached her late twenties, Eudora Welty (1909-2001) was launching a distinguished literary career. She was also becoming a capable gardener under the tutelage of her mother, Chestina Welty, who designed their modest garden in Jackson, M.

By the time she reached her late twenties, Eudora Welty (1909-2001) was launching a distinguished literary career. She was also becoming a capable gardener under the tutelage of her mother, Chestina Welty, who designed their modest garden in Jackson, Mississippi. From the beginning, Eudora wove images of southern flora and gardens into her writing, yet few outside her personal circle knew that the images were drawn directly from her passionate connection to and abiding knowledge of her own garden. Near the end of her life, Welty still resided in her parents' house, but the garden-and the friends who remembered it-had all but vanished. When a local garden designer offered to help bring it back, Welty began remembering the flowers that had grown in what she called \"my mother's garden.\" By the time Eudora died, that gardener, Susan Haltom, was leading a historic restoration. When Welty's private papers were released several years after her death, they confirmed that the writer had sought both inspiration and a creative outlet there. This book contains many previously unpublished writings, including literary passages and excerpts from Welty's private correspondence about the garden. The authors of One Writer's Garden also draw connections between Welty's gardening and her writing. They show how the garden echoed the prevailing style of Welty's mother's generation, which in turn mirrored wider trends in American life: Progressive-era optimism, a rising middle class, prosperity, new technology, women's clubs, garden clubs, streetcar suburbs, civic beautification, conservation, plant introductions, and garden writing. The authors illustrate this garden's history--and the broader story of how American gardens evolved in the early twentieth century-with images from contemporary garden literature, seed catalogs, and advertisements, as well as unique historic photographs. Noted landscape photographer Langdon Clay captures the restored garden through the seasons.

During the 1980s Eudora Welty gave her home to the state of Mississippi, to be administered by the Mississippi Department of Archives and History (MDAH). She would continue to live there for the rest of her life, and after her passing it would become a literary house museum. She was a longtime friend to MDAH—indeed, former director Charlotte Capers was one of her closest friends and had facilitated the first of many gifts of Welty’s papers. In a 1987 interview with Welty, Capers asked about the objects in the house as a record for the future. Between their dry

“The house was on a slight hill (my mother never could see the hill) covered with its original forest pines, on a gravel road then a little out from town,” Welty wrote inOne Writer’s Beginnings. Recalling the early years in the house on Pinehurst Street often prompted her to remember the tall pines that grew on the property before the house was built, and how her father had instructed the architect to preserve the seven mature specimens that enclosed the house site. Even before construction started, she recalled her mother saying that the house would be healthy, because of

The 1950s, when Welty began to stretch her wings, were heady years for Americans. Fifty years earlier, Chestina and Christian Welty had marveled at the inventions at the St. Louis World’s Fair before striking out to build a new life far from their hometowns. Their embrace of change, and Christian’s belief that technology would bring about a better future, marked them as typical of their generation. A similar upwelling of change and hope, also accompanied by a belief in progress through technology, buoyed the country at midcentury. With the war over, America tapped years of pent-up energy, a reservoir of

After spending the summer of 1944 in New York, Welty arrived home at night and checked on the camellias by match-light, finding ‘Leila’ to have grown prodigiously during her absence. “The apple blossom sasanquas [Camellia sasanqua] that smell like the earth were blooming,” she told Robinson, as she prepared to leaf through the back issues of theMarket Bulletinin search of “the hyacinthus ladies.”² But the joy of being back home evaporated when she learned that he had chosen to go on the night raids over Italy, moved by conscience to share the risk he was assigning to younger

When other parts of America dropped into the Great Depression, Mississippi had so little industry, and its sharecropping tenant farmers had been mired in poverty for so long, that most of the rural population didn’t have far to fall. As a result, it took longer for the Depression to take hold in a noticeable way. As Eudora observed, “[P]overty in Mississippi—white and black—really didn’t have too much to do with the Depression. It was ongoing. Mississippi was long since poor, long devastated.”² Four years later, however, the state’s scant fifty-two thousand industrial jobs had dropped to twenty-eight thousand.

The women who flooded into America’s booming cities at the turn of the twentieth century had reason to miss their mothers and sisters back on the farm. At least there, women could work together, or with their husbands and children, as they moved among diverse laborious tasks. In the cities and new suburbs, with limited opportunities for higher education and jobs outside the home, many women felt isolated and socially starved.³ Whether they dug ditches or balanced the books in a large company, men in city jobs left their wives at home during business hours. Although the conventional wisdom holds